Back in the N64 days, there was a game featuring a spiky blue-haired ninja wielding a pipe and, occasionally, a giant robot. This was Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, one of the very very few – and last – of the Goemon games produced by Konami to make it over to the U.S. Humor littered every corner of the game, but the franchise never got as big as it did in its homeland. Even so, the speedruns, of which there are only two categories, are a good watch, and this is one from 2014’s SGDQ by Pykn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_-Z50DbAWs
Pykn, as well as most Mystical Ninja runners, uses the Japanese version due to the presence of a couple glitches that allow them to skip portions of the game. One such glitch is demonstrated within the first couple of minutes, and it’s for this reason that a GDQ video was chosen here over a record run. During GDQ, the techs are explained so it’s easier to follow along with what’s happening on the screen. The any% record for Mystical Ninja can be seen here. It’s still being actively run, as there are a few on that list less than a month old.
Those who have been keeping up with Konami news might suspect that this game wasn’t picked arbitrarily, and they’d be right. The company recently purchased the domain goemon.com for an unknown purpose, though currently any attempt to access it results in nothing more than a blank screen. If you have an N64 packed away in a closet somewhere, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is more than worth a try if you find yourself without much to do one afternoon.
Speaking of undersold N64 games, we turned over to the also-magical Glover last time to see how many hand jokes we could stuff into one article without being obnoxious. The answer: probably not very many.